Holding Fire, Nick’s Ceramics
South Pasadena
An exhibition and an 8 week course.
“I also find fire, and without fire no creation is possible, for fire makes coalescence. Fire, earth, and water are all parts of creation, passion, experience, flow. Once I have tapped those sources, writing becomes as natural as singing.” – Anais Nin
In Holding Fire, Gabrielle Costa and Sarah Phenix sculpt clay and wax in conversation with each other through material focused sigil-esque structures, making way for transformation, transmutation and an honoring of the ordinary. Earth, water, fire and air exist as gateways to coalescence, while the abstraction of gates and mundane forms consider boundaries, parameters and what closeness really means. These works share a sense of possibility in the ordinary, in the ground, in what is here, right now.
The First Man Made Fire
From The Cool Overhead Manifesto by R. Jamin
If provided a catalyst, a flickering soul would reveal itself to be hidden in every body and object on earth. Following this thread of logic, two rocks were smashed together with tremendous extractive force.
The act was one of mysterious faith, as somewhere internal in every object was divine electricity, jumping white peppercorns. Light could be milked from every willing surface, and the abundance of the nascent globe was revealed to human hands. In this moment every hair in every pore was electric, standing on end like defiant needles through a velvet curtain.
The acting hands remembered they were animal, that the hard gray things that made this lightning were mineral, and that the dry grasses that caught the flying heat and stretched it upwards into a little golden flame were vegetable. This beautiful trinity had created a bright burning fire, and was all that was required to maintain it. All of the sudden the night became warm, light, and safe. Matter had found a way to extract the remnants of the sun, which had kept small pieces of itself tucked away in everything that exists.
